Rise of the machines: the death of a decent day's work

My working life began pushing a two-stroke mower across the sprawling lawns of my suburban childhood home – a tricky business mustering enough force to pull the starter cord but, after that, a thoroughly satisfying process of methodically retracing one's steps at half-metre-spaced increments.

Later, I'd land my first real job as a retail sales attendant at a big chain women's fashion store, where I quickly eschewed the more customer-facing aspects of retail – like actually talking to people at the till - to hide in the lingerie section, where I occupied myself with the pernickety business of adjusting bra straps back to their shortest length, looping them onto hangers and returning them to the racks.

There is a much talked about threat of robots stealing our jobs.Credit:AFR

While studying for my an economics degree, I spent most of my university holidays doing office-based temping work, including data entry, answering phones and entire working days spent folding paper, stuffing envelopes and licking stamps - or pressing them on to moist foam pads to save my salivary glands.

Perhaps it's the rose-tinted glasses, but I look back on those jobs with increasing fondness.

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What a wonderful thing to turn up to work, know exactly what is expected of one, execute that task with lightning speed and retire – happy boss and happy worker - to the pub at 5pm.

Sure, the money was pretty average – although certainly better than some other entry level jobs on offer – but life had a satisfying segregation to it: 9am to 5pm to earn the money and the evenings and weekends to enjoy it.

Even in my life time, the world of work has changed dramatically – and it's not entirely clear it is for the better.

On the optimistic side, a report released last week by economic consultancy Alpha Beta – run by a former Rudd government economic advisor,Andrew Charlton – paints the increasing automation of routine tasks like envelope stuffing and lawn mowing as a good thing.

Commissioned by tech giant Google, the gist of the report is that rather than threatening our livelihoods, increasing automation will liberate workers to do more intellectual, creative and interconnected tasks.

"Automation is causing Australian workers to rely more on their brains and personalities than on physical labour," it finds, predicting that by 2030 "machines will likely take over 2 hours of our most repetitive manual job tasks per week".

To arrive at this estimate of two hours saved a week, economists at Alpha Beta broke down – for the first time – the 20 billion hours of work performed by Australian workers each year into specific tasks, via a complex method of matching Aussie data on hours worked by occupation to US data on the specific tasks actually involved in different jobs.

Tasks were then split into six categories. Tasks categorised as "interpersonal, creative & decision-making and information synthesis" were deemed at less risk of automation, and included things like teaching, software design and industry analysis. Most at risk of automation were tasks classed as "information analysis, predictable physical and unpredictable physical", done by workers like cashiers, assembly line workers and car mechanics.

The analysis found that in 2000, Aussie workers spent 40 per cent of their working hours performing tasks that fell into the easily automatable categories. By 2015, this had shrunk to just 34 per cent. If that trend continues, by 2030, Aussie workers will spend just 28 per cent of their working week doing easily automated tasks – a reduction of two hours a week.

Assuming we'll want to keep being paid for those hours, employees will have to find some other, higher-order, work to do. If we don't have the skills, we may end up unemployed.

That is the much talked about threat of robots stealing our jobs.

With optimism to put Pollyanna to shame, the report presents an optimistic scenario, in which all liberated labour is redeployed into higher value production, and the economy gets a $1 trillion boost by 2030 from increasing automation. Better yet, if we could increase our level of automation to match our global peers, we could get an even bigger $2.2 trillion boost.

That's a big "if".

If workers are not able to upskill, there will be a loss to the economy through higher long term unemployment.

But for those who do find work, the report concludes that the disappearance of many easily automatable tasks is nothing to cry over, these tasks being often the most dangerous, lowest paid and least enjoyable work on offer.

"As automation shifts these dangerous, tedious and less valuable tasks from people to machines, work injuries are set to fall and work satisfaction levels bound to rise as workers can focus on more creative and interpersonal activities. Automation will make work safer, more meaningful and more valuable. In other words: machines will make human work more 'human'."

Which is nice work, if you can get it.

But even then, I'm not convinced this shift to brain-heavy, constantly-connected work is so good for us. Sure, it may be higher paid, but at worst it heralds the death of a traditional decent day's work and heralds a new world where our brains are permanently "switched on".

If we were sensible, we'd curb our consumerist desires, take the 24 extra minutes a day the machines are giving us and spend it at the pub with friends, or at the beach with our families.